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SULLIVAN COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY HISTORY MAKER AWARD 2013

Gladys Olmsted, RN (10/19/1924 - 8/10/1997)

a pioneer in public health nursing in Sullivan County began her career as the county’s first Public Health Nurse in 1951, in an “office” with a dirt floor in the basement of the courthouse and retired 34 years later as the Director of the Sullivan County Public Health Nursing Service. She saw great drama in public health nursing, “cutting down the rate of premature infant births, helping someone with polio move a muscle.” “How could you not be excited?”

SULLIVAN COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY HISTORY PRESERVER AWARD 2013

JOHN B. (Jack) NIFLOT (2/10/35 - 6/22/13)

Town of Fremont Board Member and Historian, whose dedication and advocacy for understanding and preserving the history and heritage of the Upper Delaware Valley is best exemplified by his co-founding of the Basket Historical Society in 1980, establishing its museum in Long Eddy and publishing/editing its newsletter, the ECHO, continuously since then.

The words of Max Yasgur, on whose farm the Woodstock Festival took place during three steamy August days during the summer of 1969, delighted the hundreds of thousands of young people who had gathered on his meadows to hear the legendary rock and folk music artists of the era. "I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this..." reveals a different aspect to the festival, and its later reincarnation into the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, that is now explored by the new exhibit being assembled at the Sullivan County Museum. The land on which the stage was erected was cleared by early Scottish immigrants nearly a century and a half earlier. This exhibit will follow this, and subsequent, families whose own stories preceeded that of Yasgur.